This is the relative calm before the storm. Suzanne started having regular contractions 6:30 Wednesday morning. We were at home for most of the day while she was in early labor. We went to the hospital at 8. We went to the triage room where they monitor you for a bit and see if you're admittable, checking to see if your water has broken or you're more than 4 cm dilated. The nurse that first started observing Suzanne, at about 8:30pm, said, "I don't want to worry you, but I don't think you're really in labor". Amia was born less than 3 hours later. She said that what threw her off was how calm Suzanne was. The pain hadn't become so intense yet that she had to express it vocally yet. After they realized she was in labor we took a walk around the labor and delivery floor and visited the family gathered in the waiting room. While were there, just about 20 minutes, Suzanne had 5 contractions and no one could really tell I think. Just after this we went to the jacuzzi and that's when the party really got started.

I guess I mention this to say 2 things. One is that every woman is different during labor. There's no right or wrong way to do things. Some women are quiet (we saw one water birth where the woman literally didn't make a sound), and some are very vocal and loud. Some births happen in homes, birthing centers, or hospitals. We were really glad it happened during the hospital actually, because we had ready access to a huge body of knowledge and a professional staff. And there were enough birthing philosophies represented at the hospital that we felt we got several sides to every issue, whether it was about epidurals, water births, epesiotomies, doulas, pacifiers, whatever. Second, forget any movie you've ever seen with a delivery scene, and that kind of includes a Baby's Story on TLC. In our experience they tend to make things more dramatic (e.g. it doesn't really make good TV to show a woman laboring at home for 15 hours. More dramatic and entertaining is the woman who instantly goes into active labor and is rushed to the hospital, preferably through heavy traffic), or they don't show the whole range of experiences available to a woman. Maybe we just haven't seen enough of it, but every birth we've seen on A Baby Story involved a male doctor, an epidural, and the woman lying on her back. That's definitely a part of birthing experiences, but there's a whole other way of doing things that can be beneficial to mother and baby that are often not explored because "that's not the way it's done". Part of getting ready for the birth and actually doing it was getting through our preconceived ideas about what it actually entailed.

As I woke up this morning, after about 8 hours of interrupted sleep, I calculated how much we'd slept since Suzanne went into labor Wednesday morning. These are my E.S.T.s (Estimated Sleep Times):
Suzanne: 15 hours
Husayn: 12 hours
Amia: 40+ hours
I slept about 2 hours that first night, Suzanne a little less because of the nurses checking in on her. Thursday I slept about 2 hours, Suzanne about 4 or 5 as the nurse parade trickled to one check at night. Last night we both slept about 8 hours, but in 2-3 hour intervals.

I guess what I'm saying is that I wish I'd known how much work this was going to be. I mean you hear people talk about it, and it scares the crap out of you as it slowly sinks in as the pregnancy progresses, but you don't really know know it until you do it. And the real kicker is that raising a child has to be the most challenging, complex thing anyone will ever do in their life, and for the first couple months you only sleep in 2-3 hour intervals. Who designed that? And this is with a baby as even-tempered as Amia, who rarely cries, and then only when she's really really uncomfortable (I'm really praying she doesn't get colicky). Not that I'm regretting or complaining. There are just some design quirks I'd like to ask about and there's no hotline or customer service department to call and that doesn't seem fair.